Scientist hits back at Daily Mail's "global cooling" claim

Scientist hits back at Daily Mail's "global cooling" claim

An article over the weekend in the UK’s Daily Mail titled The mini ice age starts here, is being refuted by the scientist whose research was used in the story to back the claim that global warming is nothing to worry about because we are entering a phase of “global cooling.”

“”It comes as a surprise to me that people would try to use my statements to try to dispute the nature of global warming. I believe in manmade global warming. I have said that if my name was not Mojib Latif it would be global warming.”

The Daily Mail is prone to publishing attention-grabbing stories on climate change. Most recently the newspaper claimed that Chinese hackers in league with Russians may be behind the leaked emails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University.

No correction has appeared on the Daily Mail article yet, so I have emailed the correction and a link to the Gaurdian article to the Sunday editor here: [email protected]

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Fox News has picked up on the Daily Mail story. Their story has the headline “30 Years of Global Cooling Are Coming, Leading Scientist Says” (The Fox story is found at http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/01/11/years-global-cooling-coming-say-leading-scientists/)

Fox writes: “it could be just the beginning of a decades-long deep freeze, says Professor Mojib Latif, one of the world’s leading climate modelers.” And: “Latif thinks the cold snap Americans have been suffering through is only the beginning. He says we’re in for 30 years of cooler temperatures – a mini ice age, he calls it.” Neither is a attributed as direct quote from Latif.

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects.

They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies.

The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.

Like what? Specifically, and with evidence to back it up, what’s going to change to make reality of the future “grim.” Seems pretty “grim” in the UK right now with the cold. So cold that wind farms are producing just 0.2% of their power instead of the 5% they normally do.

I just went to the Daily Mail article to leave a comment. To do so, I had to register with their site and agree to their terms and conditions. One of which is that I will not post anything which is “defamatory, malicious, threatening, false, misleading, offensive, abusive, discriminatory, harassing, blasphemous or racist”.

Maybe the Daily Mail understands irony better than I thought they did…

I am not surprised by this. Journalist David Rose invested much energy trying to convince the world that Saddam Hussein had trained the 11 September terrorists on a Boeing 707 at a top-secret military base in Salman Pak, South of Baghdad. He interviewed a senior Iraqi defector who described the conditioning of Osama bin Laden’s men. The same information appeared in a White House background paper and US State Department document (both circulated to the press).

Unfortunately for David Rose, the defector was later exposed as a fraud and the Iraqi military base in question was constructed under British supervision during the Iran-Iraq War, not to train terrorists, but for the purposes of counter-terrorism training. The Special Air Service (SAS) had the task of training their Iraqi counterparts and the camp took on a similar appearance to one in Herefordshire, UK (complete with a Tupolev 154).

Rose expressed sorrow over the affair and it was to be hoped, in future, he would check his sources more thoroughly.

Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.

There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.